For God's sake, Abram gave up the environment where his faith could not grow, the friends who could not share his faith, and the nationhood that was riddled with corruption. He sought foundations, and made his vast choice because he needed something more solid on which to build than the life he found in his native town.
Life is ever a matter of choice. There is a tension of good and evil, God and the world, in us and about us all the time. And the right choice means putting the future above the present, and putting the unseen above the seen, and putting others before self. And all of this is against the drag and pull of human nature. That is why it is that faith in this process becomes the righteousness which is imputed to faith, as Paul describes in the Epistle to the Romans.
Abram is the first great personality of the bible to come near and close to us. Noah is remote: Abram is human, real, and understandable. We feel his problems are our problems; and note above all, the way his faith was chequered with doubt.
The great figures of the bible are not monumental, monolithic, and apart; unable to sin as we sin, unable to stumble as we so often stumble; but people like ourselves, men and women of like passions with us. Hence the usefulness, the inspiration that their stories bring: and that behind it all, the loving God. Abram stumbles, abandons the place of blessing, doubts, hurries on ahead of God; but always God's love surrounds him, and always the mercy of God draws him back to the place of blessing. It is part of the courtesy of heaven, as C.S.Lewis says, "to count the desire, the willingness, as the achievement".
Life is ever a matter of choice. There is a tension of good and evil, God and the world, in us and about us all the time. And the right choice means putting the future above the present, and putting the unseen above the seen, and putting others before self. And all of this is against the drag and pull of human nature. That is why it is that faith in this process becomes the righteousness which is imputed to faith, as Paul describes in the Epistle to the Romans.
Abram is the first great personality of the bible to come near and close to us. Noah is remote: Abram is human, real, and understandable. We feel his problems are our problems; and note above all, the way his faith was chequered with doubt.
The great figures of the bible are not monumental, monolithic, and apart; unable to sin as we sin, unable to stumble as we so often stumble; but people like ourselves, men and women of like passions with us. Hence the usefulness, the inspiration that their stories bring: and that behind it all, the loving God. Abram stumbles, abandons the place of blessing, doubts, hurries on ahead of God; but always God's love surrounds him, and always the mercy of God draws him back to the place of blessing. It is part of the courtesy of heaven, as C.S.Lewis says, "to count the desire, the willingness, as the achievement".
